Web auctioneer eBay Inc said on Monday it had bought Tradera.com, a small Swedish rival, for about $48 million.Tradera.com has more than 750,000 listings at any given time, eBay said in a statement, adding it had plans to expand online trading in Sweden using its new investment.

eBay said it did not expect the acquisition to have a material impact on its financial guidance issued with its first-quarter results last week.

Tradera’s investors include Provider Funds and TIME Vision bpart AB.

Software giant Microsoft Corp. said on Friday it hired away Steve Berkowitz, the chief executive of rival Internet company Ask.com, to head Microsoft’s own Internet business.Effective May 8, Berkowitz succeeds David Cole, a 20-year Microsoft veteran, who is set to begin a one-year leave of absence, Microsoft said in a statement. He had outlined his plans in a memo to employees in February.

Berkowitz is credited in the industry with orchestrating the turnaround of Ask.com, the Web search and media business acquired by Barry Diller’s conglomerate, IAC/InterActiveCorp, for $1.85 billion 13 months ago.

Under his leadership, Ask, originally known as Ask Jeeves, enjoyed a revival in its audience and market share gains in the highly competitive Web search business over the past year.

Berkowitz was named the senior vice president of Microsoft’s recently formed Online Business Group, which brings together the operations of Microsoft’s MSN Internet business unit with other consumer businesses within Microsoft.

The group includes MSN.com, MSNTV and MSN Internet Access programming, advertising sales, business development, and marketing for Live Platforms, MSN and Windows Live, with responsibility for generating greater advertising sales.

Microsoft’s Online Business Group competes against rivals such as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit and Ask.com.

Berkowitz will report to Kevin Johnson, co-president of Microsoft’s platforms and services unit, Microsoft said.

He propelled Ask Jeeves into the contemporary Web search market with the acquisition of Teoma in 2001. He led the redesign of Ask, made the site easier to use by removing pop-up and banner ads and providing greater context on searches.

Revenue more than doubled under his leadership.

Previously, Berkowitz was president and chief operating officer of technology trade publisher IDG Books, where he built a hit consumer brand by expanding the “Dummies” series of books to cover topics ranging from the Web to pet care. He expanded IDG Books by acquiring publishing brands such as Cliffs Notes, Frommers Travel Guides and Betty Crocker Cookbooks.

Google Inc CEO Eric Schmidt on Wednesday defended the search engine’s cooperation with Chinese censorship as he announced the creation of a Beijing research center and unveiled a Chinese-language brand name.Google is trying to raise its profile in China after waiting until January to launch its Chinese-language site Google.cn.

Activists have criticized the company for blocking searches for material about Taiwan, Tibet, democracy and other sensitive issues on the site.

“We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one,” Schmidt said at a news conference.

He said Google had to accept restrictions in order to serve China, which has the world’s second-largest population of Internet users after the United States, with more than 111 million people online.

Schmidt also announced the creation of a research center in Beijing that he said should have 150 employees by mid-2006 and “eventually thousands of people.” He said the center is meant to create products for markets worldwide, though he said planning was still in such an early stage that he didn’t know what they might be.

Schmidt was speaking at a ceremony to announce Google’s Chinese-language brand name — ‘Gu Ge,’ or ‘Valley Song,’ which the company says draws on Chinese rural traditions to describe a fruitful and rewarding experience.

Talking to reporters later, Schmidt said Google’s managers were stung by criticism that they accepted Chinese censorship, but said they haven’t lobbied Beijing to change its rules.

“I think it’s arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning to operate and tell that country how to operate,” he said.

Asked whether Google might try to persuade Beijing to change its restrictions, Schmidt said he didn’t rule anything out, but said it hasn’t tried to change such limits elsewhere. He noted that Google’s site in Germany is barred from linking to Nazi-oriented material.

“There are many cases where certain information is not available due to local law or local custom,” he said.

Schmidt said China accounts for only a small portion of Google’s revenues because the company has only recently obtain a license to allow it to carry local advertising. But he said the company expects China to be an important part of its future business.

One possible Google project in China would be to make Chinese books available online in digital form or to use translation software to produce English-language editions, Schmidt said.

He said the Beijing technical center could quickly become Google’s biggest outside the United States, surpassing its European lab in Zurich, Switzerland.

Chinese universities “are now churning out a very large number of very, very good programmers,” he said. “So we are moving quickly now to hire the best and the brightest.”

Google Inc. is introducing on Thursday a free Web calendar service for consumers to schedule events and share them with others, opening a new level of competition with rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.Google Calendar, available at www.google.com/calendar, offers a variety of features to make using Web calendars as easy as desktop calendars such as Outlook, allowing users to “drag and drop” events from one calendar to another.

The new service takes advantage of slick Web programming tricks using Javascript and XML along with RSS. But perhaps the biggest breakthrough is the calendar’s use of “natural language processing” technology that simplifies how events are entered.

The feature allows users to type simple commands like “leave work today at 5 p.m.” or “drinks Thursday with Elinor” that the system can interpret and automatically insert into the calendar. Events can be private, shared with friends, or made public on the Web, Google Calendar’s product manager said.

“Google Calendar takes all the events in my life and keeps them in one place,” Carl Sjogreen said in a phone interview.

“We enable the user to create multiple calendars, share them with other people and overlay Web calendars back on the user’s own calendar,” the Google product manager said.

Users of Google’s free e-mail service Gmail may find the Google Calendar particularly useful. Google’s software scours Gmail to recognize mentions of events and then automatically offers the user to add the date information to the calendar.

PRESSING OTHERS TO INNOVATE

Details of the long-rumored calendar, complete with screenshots of features and instruction guides, had leaked out in late February among Silicon Valley technology enthusiasts.

The calendar poses a direct challenge to Yahoo Calendar, the No. 1 Web calendar service in the United States, which was introduced in 1998 and has changed little in substance in recent years. But Google said it plans to “play nice” and allow users to share Google Calendar events with Yahoo Calendar.

While Sjogreen is careful to say that Google Calendar is not designed to replace corporate calendars, it could raise expectations among office workers that its features should be part of corporate scheduling systems like Microsoft’s Outlook or IBM’s Lotus Notes.

Sjogreen said Google is working to offer seamless connections to Microsoft Outlook, the Palm Treo smartphone and to various other mobile phone calendars in coming months.

The trial version of Google Calendar is being offered in English. Gmail users will begin being offered the service within the next week. In coming months, Google will translate the calendar into multiple languages, Sjogreen said.

The Sunnyvale, California-based rival of Google said in a statement that the company is working on updates to Yahoo Calendar, which it plans to release in coming months.

Last year, Yahoo acquired Upcoming.org. (http://upcoming.org/), a social event calendar that helps users manage events, share them with friends and family, and post notifications to one’s own or to other Web sites.

It seems kind of strange to have Microsoft, long considered the open source “enemy,” to deliver a keynote at a conference about Linux, but that’s exactly what happened in Boston today. Microsoft Platform Technology Strategy Director Bill Hilf delivered a keynote on interoperability between Windows and Linux and discussed the maturation of the debate between the two operating systems.

He also detailed Microsoft’s own test efforts in its Open Source Software Lab and officially announced the launch of Port 25, the communications and blogging site that gives some additional character and personality to those efforts.

Knowing that he stood at the head of an audience that may not have been particularly enamored of Microsoft, Hilf took every opportunity to make sure the audience knew that he knew what they think about Microsoft.

“This is the first time that Microsoft has ever done a LinuxWorld keynote,” Hilf said. “Hopefully you won’t throw things at me.”

Hilf then detailed the scale and scope that Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab entails.

“We focus heavily on scenarios that exist between Microsoft and open source and also test in development to see what will happen.”

The lab has over 300 servers and client systems running nearly every Linux, Unix and BSD distribution. Hardware includes IBM’s Power and Sun’s Sparc, as well as x86 based systems.

“We run nearly every operating system there is,” Hilf said. ” Diversity in our lab is super important, so we intentionally make it very complex.”

Beyond just an exercise in running operating systems, Hilf’s group also runs both commercial and open source applications across the lab’s servers.

Hilf noted colloquially that at the entrance to Microsoft’s Open Source Labs, there are three penguins: one with hands over his ears (hear no evil), eyes (see no evil) and mouth (speak no evil).

“Its a reminder that we do technical research, and we don’t get caught up in hype or systems; we deal with technical systems.”

Microsoft’s Open Source Labs efforts are all about helping to figure out interoperability. He noted that Microsoft isn’t all about vendor lock in and there it recognizes there is choice in the market.

“Sometimes we have to compete and co-operate in the same breadth,” Hilf said. “We do that with many partners today including IBM, SAP, Oracle and others.”

Hilf said that the laws of physics do not apply to the software business, and that it is infinitely malleable.

“Standards should be adaptive to market conditions,” he said.

A key to figuring out those market conditions is getting feedback, which is what Microsoft is doing with its Port 25 initiative.

Port 25 is a play on the fact that port 25 is typically used for SMTP (define) for e-mail communication.

The site contains blogs, interviews and technical analysis from Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab. The goal is to open the feedback loop so that Microsoft can “communicate” better with the open source community.

Hilf expects the feedback will be productive and not like some of the anti-Microsoft arguments of the past.

“I’m very proud to see the evolution of this industry that we’ve done away with the childish squabbling of ‘mine is better than yours,’” Hilf said.

“Commercial and open source can co-exist and it’s a maturation of what’s going on in our industry.”

Amid a flurry of announcements at CTIA today, PayPal officially rolled out PayPal Mobile, calling the SMS payment system the first of its kind.

Then they corrected themselves, admitting there may be some smaller companies with similar services already available.

But they don’t really matter, PayPal said. And analysts agreed.

First introduced last month, PayPal Mobile allows users to send a text to “PayPal” (729725) from their phones and enter the dollar amount they want to send to a particular vendor, charity or user ID number.

PayPal will then contact the mobile user to confirm and complete the transaction.

Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru is enthusiastic about the service.

“Conceptually, it’s a great idea,” she told internetnews.com. “It’s the easiest system I’ve seen. Before if you were going to pay on your cell phone, you’d have to get a lot more pieces involved.”

Dana Stalder, PayPal senior vice president of business operations, gushed at praise like that.

“Nobody has really built or offered the product that PayPal is bringing to the market today,” he told internetnews.com, but soon remembered that TextPayMe started offering SMS payments in December.

“I think from a basic function standpoint, there are some similarities [between the two products],” he said.

Then he presented the differences.

“The fundamental difference with PayPal comes in first and foremost with the power of the network,” he said, “[Our] 100 million accounts fundamentally change the utility of the payment system.”

It’s true that TextPayMe does not have 100 million accounts.

“It’s not near 40 million,” TextPayMe spokesperson Phillip Yuen told internetnews.com. “We have a decent amount of users and it’s growing at a nice rate.”

Mulpuru said the disparity in subscriber numbers is enough to make PayPal different.

“PayPal has 100+ million accounts. It’s got eBay. And it’s got that name recognition,” she said.

What’s more, Mulpuru said, 100 million accounts is enough to make a mobile payments system matter.

But right now, they don’t. At least not in the United States. Here, consumers think of their mobile devices as phones alone.

But by offering PayPal Mobile for free, Mulpurua said, PayPal can change those habits.

“They are leveraging their backbone, the 100 million accounts they already have,” she said. “They are getting people used to this technology on a very small scale.”

Exactly, Stadler said.

“I think that [perception] is changing, has been changing, and will continue to change,” he said. “I think that it is great customer-oriented use cases like PayPal Mobile that are going to be the driver behind those changes.”

And that’s something even underappreciated TextPayMe can appreciate. Sometimes it takes a big player with 100 million accounts to change consumer expectations.

“They’ve done some good things,” Yuen said, acknowledging competition. “They’ve actually brought us a lot of attention through this.”

Microsoft unveiled its plans to release a free, mobile version of its SQL Server database at a customer event here today. SQL Server Everywhere Edition is scheduled for release in the second half of this year. The stripped down mobile version of Microsoft’s enterprise class SQL Server database software will be free to download and use. Microsoft also said it plans to embed “Everywhere” in mobile devices by making it part of the Windows Mobile services already includes in many PDAs and other portable computers.

“We’ve had a lot of requests for a lightweight, very small database that can be truly embedded in mobile applications as one file, and we’ve addressed that here,” Illya Bukshteyn, SQL Server Marketing Director at Microsoft told internetnews.com. “It’s pretty unique to have a free database with reporting capabilities and BI [business intelligence] and runs applications.”

SQL Server Everywhere is free to use, but to access or synchronize with a Microsoft SQL Server database users need a client license. Microsoft offers both individual client and per processor licenses.

The real key to SQL Server Everywhere’s growth will be third party applications. Microsoft already offers a free database, SQL Express, released in November. Since its release, Bukshteyn says there has been over two million downloads of Express, and what he called a “booming community” of developers. But the small footprint and mobility of SQL Server Everywhere promises even broader appeal . “We think we’ve taken it up a notch with SQL Everywhere,” said Bukshteyn.

Ron Lichty, VP for product engineering at Forensic Logic, said he was impressed by Everywhere’s potential. Among other applications, Forensic Logic develops database software for police departments.

“For a police officer to be able to open a mobile device out in the field and quickly access the data and analytics he or she needs instead of waiting for a dispatcher would be very valuable,” Lichty told . “Government clients are also going to like the fact that it’s free.”

SQL Server Everywhere will run on any current version of Windows for servers, desktops tablets or mobile devices. It requires only between one or two megabytes of storage, according to Microsoft.

Separately, Microsoft announced its SQL Server AlwaysOn certification program. Essentially, Microsoft said it will certify the high availability features in its database for use by OEMs such as server manufacturers. Those server makers will be able to use the AlwaysOn certification branding in their marketing. Microsoft plans customer roll out announcements at its TechEd conference this June in Boston.

“We’re seeing customers like the NASDAQ stock exchange use SQL Server 2005 for the most demanding applications,” said Bukshteyn. “There’s no work load they won’t trust to it.”

The price of a free citywide wireless network planned for San Francisco may be increased advertising for users.

A patent application filed recently by Google details a method of pushing highly targeted advertising to users of wireless hotspots, and sharing the ad revenue with the wireless service provider.

On Wednesday a San Francisco city commission approved a bid by Google and Internet service provider EarthLink to provide free wireless access throughout the city. The Department of Telecommunications and Information Services will now begin contract negotiations with EarthLink and Google.

What makes the Google patent potentially attractive to service providers is the search giant’s ability to serve up personalized ads. According to the patent, the advertising a wireless user would see is based on the “geographical location of the WAP, an operation of an entity providing the WAP, selected by the entity providing the WAP, and a profile of the WAP.”

In other words, such a system would allow, for example, a bookstore in New York city to push ads for newly published novels that appeal to their local customers, or perhaps even ads that suit the shoppers buying habits as gleaned from his or her customer loyalty card profile.

Providers of wireless hotspots could also sell advertising for stores in a specific vicinity, allowing retailers who run businesses not conducive to wireless use to market themelves.

Technically the process works like this: The wireless access point directs all traffic to Google through a virtual private network. Google’s servers process the information and insert the correct ads into the datastream that is sent to the end user.

The advertising could be displayed on browser’s toolbars, on separate interstitial pages, or as part of the content of a Web page.

The patent states that a Web browser’s appearance could also be altered to display logos or other brand information associated with the wireless access provider. It also notes that customers would be asked to agree to receive the ads in exchange for free wireless access.

According to the patent, which was filed in 2004 and published by the U.S. Patent Office in mid-March, the advertising can be refreshed and changed even when the user is not moving from Web page to Web page.

But Todd Kort, an analyst at Gartner, doesn’t expect to see ads sprawled all over users’ screens. He thinks the Google ad display interface will resemble Google.com, with advertising tucked into a sidebar. Kort also believes that the ads will be targeted sufficiently to make them unobtrusive.

“As long as there is that linkage with the kinds of searches people are doing, it will be tolerable,” Kort said. “I’m no more anxious to see this stuff happen than you are, but it’s probably going to happen, and we’ll have to deal with it.”

He added, “They know that people aren’t clamoring for this so they better not make it too intrusive or they’re going to get complaints. People might even stop using some devices if it becomes a painful experience.”

Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence in Oakland, Calif., echoed Kort’s thoughts.

“There’s considerable evidence that users are either ambivalent about ‘mobile advertising’ or don’t want it at all,” Sterling said. “Companies are going to need to be cautious and much more thoughtful about mobile marketing than its online counterpart. Users are going to be much less tolerant of advertising on mobile devices that isn’t opt-in or highly targeted to their interests.”

Access to wireless hotspot service is sometimes offered free by businesses hoping to woo customers; hotels, for example, have been in the forefront of offering free wireless access to users. Other providers charge for the service, either by the hour, day or via a subscription plan.

The stated goal of Google’s patent is to allow businesses to offer free wireless connectivity to consumers while still recouping some of the cost of providing said service.

Will the patent be put to use in San Francisco? Google isn’t saying.

“At this point we aren’t sure how we’ll monetize this service,” said Google spokeswoman Megan Quinn.

“Like many companies, we file patent apps on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services. Some don’t. Prospective product announcements should not be inferred from patent applications.”

“However, like Web search, our goal is to create services that satisfy the information needs of users while also creating new markets for advertisers and local businesses.”

Online DVD rental company Netflix Inc. on Tuesday sued rival Blockbuster Inc. for patent infringement, asking a federal judge in Northern California to shut down Blockbuster’s 18-month-old online rental service and award Netflix damages, according to a copy of the filing.Blockbuster declined to comment, saying it had not received a copy of the lawsuit.

Netflix, which was founded in 1999, holds two U.S. patents for its business methodology, which calls for subscribers to pay a monthly fee to select and rent DVDs from the company’s Web site and to maintain a list of titles telling Netflix in which order to ship the films, according to the patents, which were included as exhibits in the lawsuit.

The first patent, granted in 2003, covers the method by which Netflix customers select and receive a certain number of movies at a time, and return them for more titles.

The second patent, issued on Tuesday, “covers a method for subscription-based online rental that allows subscribers to keep the DVDs they rent for as long as they wish without incurring any late fees, to obtain new DVDswithout incurring additional charges and to prioritize and reprioritize their own personal dynamic queue — of DVDs to be rented,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit says No. 1 U.S. rental chain Blockbuster, which launched its online rental service in 2004, was aware that Netflix had obtained a patent for its business method and was seeking a second, but willfully and deliberately violated the existing patent.

Netflix, which is represented by the San Francisco law firm of Keker & Van Nest, is demanding a jury trial and asks that Blockbuster Online be enjoined from using Netflix’s business method and be forced to pay damages and court costs.

“We felt it necessary to take this action to protect our rights as inventors of the very unique business methods that Netflix offers,” Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said on Tuesday.

“Netflix created a very unique service, from the dynamic queue, to the idea of letting subscribers keep movies as long as they want with no late fees, to the idea of allowing customers to get new DVDs as soon as they return old ones,” Swasey said.

Since launching its online rental service in August 2004, Blockbuster has poured more than $300 million into setting it up and marketing it.

But a debt load of more than $1 billion and weakness in its primary business of store-based movie rentals forced the Dallas-based company to cut back its marketing investments this year in Blockbuster Online, which has 1 million subscribers, compared with 4.2 million for Netflix.

Shares of Netflix closed down 72 cents to $27.41 a share on Nasdaq before the suit was reported, while shares of Blockbuster fell 8 cents to $3.80 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter, who also is an attorney, said it was unclear whether Netflix’s challenge to Blockbuster’s online service would be upheld by the federal court.

“It’s my opinion that it won’t be,” Pachter said. “Blockbuster detrimentally relied on their silence as consent. If in fact (Netflix) feels so damaged they should have sought injunctive relief before Blockbuster rolled out its service.”

Some might call it an auction to die for, as the Chinese observe their traditional Qing Ming festival honouring the dead.A man in his late 20s in Jiaxing, a city near Shanghai, has attempted to sell his soul on Taobao, China’s top online auction site, attracting bids from some 58 soul-searching buyers before the posting was pulled.

“We reviewed Taobao’s policies and realized we had no specific policy on the selling of souls,” said Porter Erisman, spokesman for Taobao’s parent, Yahoo-backed Alibaba.com. “After reviewing our policies, the posting was taken down last Friday.”

Erisman said Taobao wasn’t opposed to the idea of soul selling online, but wanted more proof that the seller could provide the goods.

“After some discussion, we decided that we will allow the member to sell his soul on Taobao, but only if he can provide written permission from a ‘higher authority’,” he said.

Taobao made its decision as Chinese around the world on Wednesday observed Qing Ming, a traditional holiday where many travel to their ancestors’ graves to clean them and offer gifts to the spirits.

Taobao is no stranger to odd items being put up for auction, with past sale items including advertising space on one member’s forehead.

The firm’s chief rival, eBay, has also hosted its share of strange items for auction, including a second-hand Volkswagen once owned by Pope Benedict and a mangrove island in Florida.